Phone-a-phobia

Faith called us last night and she and Jaime talked and talked and talked. I was only able to talk to her for a few minutes, but hopefully we'll be able to talk more. She had homework and as I said, "I'm not good on the phone." And really I'm not. I'm deadly afraid of the phone. I hate talking on the phone not because I hate connecting with people but because my past has allowed this phobia to infiltrate my psyche.

Here is the history of my interaction with phones. One of my first memories is talking to my mother over the phone immediately following my parents divorce. The one sentence that I can remember saying to her: "I hate you." And really through my childhood I connected the phone with stress and conflict with my family.

It didn't change much in my adult life either. As a banker, the phone was my primary tool for manipulating people into doing what I wanted them to do. If I needed more clients, I would make phone calls trying to convince people that they needed to talk to me. The popular tactics of the time were, "We need to sit down to review your accounts and possibly offer you a higher interest rate." The real goal of this meeting was to try to get these people to invest with me. People opening checking accounts were potential loan customers; loan customers were potentially investment clients. All this business was on the phone as was getting yelled at by customers because their loan wasn't happening fast enough resulting in me
yelling at the lender over the phone.

Combine all of that with our last church, where a phone call from the pastor meant that you'd screwed up somewhere and he was going to let you know, and you'd spend the better part of the evening getting told what was wrong with you and what you needed to do to correct it...i.e. more conflict.

So even though I know that most normal people do not use the phone to yell at people, I'm still afraid of it. I also feel like I need to have this amazingly deep conversation with people all the time, and I can't handle that kind of pressure. So to anyone who calls and has the misfortune of talking to me...I'm sorry...I really do want to talk to you, I just have these weird psychological issues to deal with...I think I need to build up more positive phone interactions so please call, but understand this... My name is Ben and I'm a phone-a-phobic...